Why "Change" Is a Four-Letter Word (and I'm not sure a nicer one would help)

Change: A four-letter word?

Last month I was in conversation with a security leader, walking through what a champion program actually does inside their engineering and security teams. The discussion was going well; she shared the "silos" that existed between teams and I was sharing various ways how a champion program could help break them down. Then I said the words "culture change," and I watched something close down. Not disagreement per se, but something that felt more tired. She said her organization had been through enough "change" initiatives lately and asked "could we talk about this differently?"

I've been chewing on that ever since, because she wasn't wrong and I wasn't either. What we do at Katilyst is culture work. Champion programs, ambassador programs, the AI-adoption versions now showing up, all of them exist because you cannot get hundreds and thousands of employees to act differently by simply publishing a policy. You change what people do by changing what's normal. That's culture change. It's the honest name for it.

It's also, right now, a name that can cost me the room.

The "change budget" is already spent

The most useful thing I've read on this is a Gartner finding that gets quoted a lot and understood rarely: employee willingness to support enterprise change fell to 43% in 2022, down from 74% in 2016. In that same stretch, the number of planned enterprise changes the average employee absorbed went from two a year to ten (and likely more with the litany of AI adoption programs.) Gartner has since estimated that the amount of change a person can take on before fatiguing is about half what it used to be.

Gartner's 2023 report on enterprise change initiatives

Put those together and the picture stops being about attitude. Nobody's ability to adapt got worse. Rather, the demands on it multiplied by five while the capacity halved.

So when someone flinches at "culture change," they are usually not telling me they prefer the status quo. They're telling me their account is overdrawn. They've spent this year's "change budget" on a re-org, a platform migration, a new performance system, and an AI mandate that nobody explained. My proposed champion program is the eleventh thing. And so, the flinch is not only understood, it's expected.

"Transformation" is an even worse framing

My first instinct was to reach up the ladder. If "change" sounds small and annoying, try the bigger, more ambitious word. Transformation. Strategic. Visionary. Board-deck energy.

That instinct is backwards, and it didn't take long to see why.

"Transformation" is now the standard euphemism in layoff communications. Workforce reductions get positioned as one phase inside a larger organizational transformation, so the story reads as a company being rebuilt rather than a company being cut. Employees have learned the code. Against a 2026 backdrop of more than 200,000 tech workers cut across hundreds of separate announcements, "we're transforming" does not land as ambition. It lands as someone's job is about to go.

An executive at a Fortune panel a while back said she'd started using "evolution" instead of "transformation," specifically to get away from that instinctive reaction. I understand the impulse completely. Escalating the word naturally escalates the threat.

We earned some of this

There's a statistic our whole field has leaned on for thirty years: 70% of change initiatives fail. I know I have used it, and you have probably heard it in a pitch.

It traces back to Hammer and Champy's 1993 book on reengineering, where it appears as an explicitly unscientific estimate, and Hammer later pushed back on how it was being repeated. An Oxford Review evidence brief on the claim concluded there's no empirical foundation for it, and that the figure survives mainly because it's useful to people selling remedies for failure.

Sit with that for a second. The dominant sales argument for change management is a number that was never measured, and its function is to make you afraid enough to hire help. If you've spent a career being told change fails most of the time, and you've personally sat through ten initiatives that went nowhere, cynicism isn't a character defect. It's a reasonable forecast built from the evidence you were handed.

So... what about "Culture Enhancement"?

Here's the strongest version of the case for renaming, and it's better than it first sounds.

David Cooperrider's "Appreciative Inquiry" has argued for decades that starting from diagnosis (here's what's broken, here's the fix) reliably triggers defensiveness and blame, while starting from strengths invites participation. The word "change" carries a quiet accusation inside it: what you are doing now is wrong. "Enhancement" says something different. You're good. Let's be better at one thing.

For a team that just survived a reorg, that's not spin. It's more accurate. Most of what they do is fine. I'm asking about a narrow slice of it.

The 4-D framework of Appreciative Inquiry

And here's where I don't trust that

Steven Pinker's euphemism treadmill is the problem. Stigma doesn't live in the word, it lives in the thing the word points at. Introduce a clean new term for an uncomfortable referent and the term absorbs the discomfort, usually within a few years, and you go looking for the next one.

The Appreciative Inquiry literature has its own honest version of this. Gervase Bushe notes the movement could only distinguish itself by using deficit language to describe the problem it was solving. You cannot fully escape the frame you're arguing against.

Which means: if I say "culture enhancement" and then hand you a twelve-month program with training modules, adoption metrics, and a real ask on manager time, you will know exactly what I actually meant by the second meeting. And at that point you'll trust me less than if I had just said "change." A softer label on an identical ask is just a small lie with a short shelf life.

Three things that might matter more than the word itself

I don't have this resolved, but after seeing which programs survive past their first year, there are three patterns that show up more reliably than vocabulary does.

• The size of the ask matters! People are refusing yet another change initiative. The programs that stick tend to start very small: a small group of volunteers, one behavior, one team... rather than a mandate with a launch date. Small asks don't need a euphemism.

• Who's doing the asking? WalkMe found a 52-point trust gap on AI: 61% of executives trust it for complex decisions versus 9% of workers. That's not really a fact about AI. It's a fact about who gets to declare something a good idea. Champion and ambassador models work partly because the ask arrives sideways, from a peer, instead of top-down.

• Do we drop the vernacular entirely? At a government secure supply chain summit, participants reported real progress when they stopped using security language altogether and instead framed the need in each person's own terms and examples. Which is, I'll admit, an argument for renaming. Just not a one-time, global renaming on a website. It's done per conversation, per audience, per use case.

Where I land, which is nowhere clean (yet)

Two things are true at the same time, and I can't collapse them.

Part of my job is knowing that the market's word for our work isn't our word for it. Insisting on internal vocabulary because it's precise is a founder's vanity, and it's an expensive one.

And, no word survives contact with a big ask. Rename it, and you've bought maybe eighteen months before "enhancement" starts sounding like the thing that came before the restructure.

Maybe the real move is to stop leading with the category at all. Maybe instead we focus on describing the outcome, keeping the ask small enough that it doesn't need packaging, and letting people call it whatever they need to call it internally.

I'd rather hear from you than keep talking, though. Has your organization effectively "banned" a word? Which one, and what replaced it? Did the replacement change anything, or did everyone just translate on the fly? And if you run one of these programs, what do you call it when you're asking for budget, versus when you're asking an engineer to volunteer?

I suspect those are two different words. I suspect that's the whole point.